It was an agreement in 1985 between the provincial government and soft drink companies that allowed them to cut their use of refillable bottles and helped lay the foundation for municipal recycling programs in Ontario.

Seeing all of those blue bins lined up curbside makes us feel environmentally virtuous, doesn’t it? Well, once we understand some of the historical horse-trading that went on to get recycling put in place, we may not be quite so smug.

One of the best sources on this subject is David McRobert, who I’ve spoken to before. He has recently published e-books through amazon.com’s CreateSpace. They are essentially compendiums of studies, papers, presentations, even a draft master’s thesis that he wrote in law school. (Disclosure here: One of the books includes a Trash Talk column.)

McRobert — a lawyer, former civil servant, environmentalist and teacher — was either in the middle of the fray or sat ringside as recycling evolved. He has worked at Pollution Probe, focusing on waste management and climate change, and the Ontario Environment Ministry, helped develop blue box regulations and was in-house counsel for the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario for 16 years.

He is a fervent supporter of the first two of the three Rs — reduce and reuse — and believes our policies should promote these before recycling. He also is not shy of controversy. He has titled his blue box book: My Municipal Recycling Program Made Me Fat and Sick.

Why? Blue box funding traces its origins in Ontario to the battle over quotas for the use of refillable bottles for soft drinks. The provincial government let the industry off the hook on reusable containers in return for money directed toward recycling.

Soft-drink makers lobbied hard in the 1970s and 1980s for freedom from Ontario’s quotas for use of refillable pop bottles. They wanted to switch to single-use cans and plastic containers, which they said consumers wanted.

Supporting that position were the steelworkers and steelmakers (jobs and business), Alcan (which argued selling pop in aluminum cans because the metal’s value would bring potential revenue to recycling programs), and some environmentalists (Pollution Probe), who wanted industry funding for curbside recycling.

Clinching the blue box deal was a $1-million offer from the soft drink industry in 1985 for recycling in return for a reduction in the refillable pop bottle quota.

The funding went to what McRobert calls a “bizarre” agency, created by the soft drink makers and their allies in the aluminum, plastic, steel, glass and newsprint industries. Contributions to the agency, the precursor of the present-day Stewardship Ontario, were soon boosted to $20 million to cover a portion of municipal capital costs associated with blue box programs. With additional funds from the province, municipalities hopped on the recycling bandwagon.

So who were the losers, according to McRobert?

Taxpayers, for one. A deposit-return refillable bottling system is paid for by the drinkers and the producers, which McRobert believes is as it should be. With recycling and garbage, end-of-use costs are off-loaded.

“While the soft drink industry reduced its costs, taxpayers got the shaft,” he wrote. “Ontario municipalities and successive provincial governments spent several hundred million dollars between 1985 and the late 1990s to keep their municipal Blue Box programs going.”

Even now, industry covers only half the cost of municipal programs.

Local ma-and-pa bottling plants closed up as the pop industry restructured, putting thousands out of work. This represented significant job losses, especially in northern Ontario towns.

The impact of consumption of cheap sugary soft drinks on health has already been mentioned, and the environment is also a loser in this trade-off.

How ironic that the blue box program was built on the demise of the more eco-friendly option of reusable bottles and deposit-return. McRobert cites figures that glass containers, reused 10 times compared with aluminum cans recycled at 90 per cent, results in energy savings of 30 to 50 per cent. In 2007, Waste Diversion Ontario estimated only 45 per cent of aluminum packaging was captured in the blue box.

Recycling itself causes large amounts of pollution. “Running trucks around neighbourhoods,” McRobert says, “to pick up PET (plastic) bottles and other lightweight and low-value plastics causes more pollution than having purchasers directly return their used PET or glass refillable bottles to the grocery store. As we used to do.”

All of this is a cautionary tale. When there are advances on the environmental front, chances are there are some powerful corporate interests shaping the outcome. That’s not to say we shouldn’t have recycling, but we should still be mindful of those first two Rs, reduce and reuse. Being able to chuck something into recycling should not be a wide-open licence for guilt-free consumption.

We should also hope Big Blue doesn’t crowd out serious consideration of other systems that promote reuse or produce better, cleaner collection results, like more widespread deposit-return, which already works so well at The Beer Store and the LCBO.

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